Background
Brilliant was born on November 20, 1929 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States; the son of Frank and Pauline (Apt) Brilliant.
(It is the surest fact of our existence, one we can never ...)
It is the surest fact of our existence, one we can never escape, one that no one else can do for us and that we can never be certain when will actually happen: our death. Death has long denoted the ultimate boundary of our individual lives, yet as Richard Brilliant shows in this moving book, there are ways that we can actually surpass it. Exploring the worlds of religion, ritual, and art, he shows how we have used memory to live a life everlasting. Brilliant examines the ways that an individual’s ethos can live on long after the biological body perishes. It does so through the collective memories of survivors, being passed down to subsequent generations. Such “remainings” are created by rituals and reinforced through commemorations and obituaries and projected through art and architecture. These powerful inducements to remember counter the finality of physical death, bridging the gap between absence and presence. Weaving together a rich collection of texts and images and guiding them with deeply meaningful insights, Brilliant offers a reflective meditation on the methods that artists, architects, and writers have developed to activate memory and animate their subjects into robust afterlife. In this way, he shows, death need no longer be seen as a terminal departure but rather a transformation into a new form of existence, one carried on by the communion of others.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1780237251/?tag=2022091-20
(Facing the New World features important paintings by dist...)
Facing the New World features important paintings by distinguished American artists such as Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, Charles Willson Peale, John Wesley Jarvis, and Ralph Earl. There are portraits by unknown folk-artists and some comparative paintings of non-Jewish subjects, including a work by Joshua Johnson, an accomplished African-American painter active in the Baltimore area. The book also shows examples of early American drawings, silhouettes, decorative arts, and Jewish ritual objects. In a groundbreaking discussion, Richard Brilliant identifies the European models of representation that artists drew upon in their portraits of Jewish sitters, demonstrating how the self is portrayed by means of cultural roles and images, and how imagery and other modes of representation evolved over time. Ellen Smith explores the tension between Jewish self-representation is portraits and the social reality of early American Jewish life. She reads the portraits as social documents, forming part of the larger material world of early American. Smith captures the texture of everyday family life and the Jewish community's relationship with the larger society, documented by diaries, letters, business records, and domestics objects that have survived to this day.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3791318632/?tag=2022091-20
(This is the first general and theoretical study devoted e...)
This is the first general and theoretical study devoted entirely to portraiture. Drawing on a broad range of images from Antiquity to the twentieth century, which includes paintings, sculptures, prints, cartoons, postage stamps, medals, documents and photographs, Richard Brilliant investigates the genre as a particular phenomenon in Western art that is especially sensitive to changes in the perceived nature of the individual in society. The author's argument on behalf of portraiture (and he draws on examples by such artists as Botticelli, Rembrandt, Matisse, Warhol and Hockney) does not comprise a mere survey of the genre, nor is it a straightforward history of its reception. Instead, Brilliant presents a thematic and cogent analysis of the connections between the subject-matter of portraits and the beholder's response – the response he or she makes to the image itself and to the person it represents. Portraiture's extraordinary longevity and resilience as a genre is a testament to the power of this imaginative transaction between the subject, the artist and the beholder.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0948462191/?tag=2022091-20
(Analyzing the theme, provenance, and history of the Vatic...)
Analyzing the theme, provenance, and history of the Vatican Laocoön, Richard Brilliant traces the interpretation of this masterpiece of Greco-Roman sculpture through the ages, showing how these interpretations have shaped its reception. The Vatican Laocoön has suffered the vicissitudes of changing tastes, differing agendas of incompatible interpretations, and relegation to the margins of aesthetic preference. Several Laocoöns are identified in this erudite and strikingly original study: the alleged, lost "Greek original" the extant marbles sculpted in the first century; the sixteenth-century restoration and its impact; the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century topos of critical judgment; the twentieth-century re-restored artifact of ancient art. Yet, the Vatican Laocoön contains all of them in its obdurate self, and My Laocoön treats their history as a means of demonstrating an artwork's power to transcend its critical reception. Discovered in Rome in 1506, the Laocoön stimulated the imagination of sixteenth-century artists and humanists because of the sculpture’s expressive exploitation of the human body under stress. Variations in the critical reception of the Laocoön and disagreements about what the work represented, and how it did so, came to a climax when it became the victim of the controversy between Winckelmann and Lessing. Lessing’s anti-Laocoön Laocoön, certainly one of the seminal tracts of aesthetic criticism, eventually won out. Ironically, this victory coincided with Winckelmann’s invention of the history of ancient art, which differentiated between Greek and Roman artworks and bestowed upon the former a much higher aesthetic evaluation. This value-laden historiographical development seriously affected the Laocoön’s reception, once scholars deemed it a "Roman" work, perhaps even a copy of a lost Greek original. The Laocoön was doubly damned: it was Roman, not Greek, and its ontological credentials had been compromised, often to such a degree that the marbles were rendered almost invisible in the search for the Greek precedents. Re-restoration of the Laocoön in 1960 intensified its emotive power, but by then artists and critics had become indifferent. Brilliant tells the Laocoön story with wit and erudition, and his selection of Laocoön illustrations masterfully demonstrates the influence that this work has exerted over the centuries.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520216822/?tag=2022091-20
(During the spring of 2004 the Minneapolis Institute of Ar...)
During the spring of 2004 the Minneapolis Institute of Arts held an exhibition of Roman mythological figures and portraits from the Miller Collection, an important American private collection of Roman sculpture. This richly illustrated volume presents the catalogue, comprising thirty-one portrait heads, funerary reliefs of people and animals, and mythical figures and beasts. Each work of art is presented in a full-page colour photograph with a facing description and discussion. Richard Brilliant's introductory discussion considers the collector's vision of his friend Dr Miller while Sheree Jaros introduces the catalogue itself.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/091296491X/?tag=2022091-20
(Illustrated book of Roman Art about the The Use of Gestur...)
Illustrated book of Roman Art about the The Use of Gestures to Denote Status and Rank in Roman Sculpture and Coinage
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0685228576/?tag=2022091-20
Brilliant was born on November 20, 1929 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States; the son of Frank and Pauline (Apt) Brilliant.
Brilliant received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Classics from Yale University in 1951. Three years later he earned his Bachelor of Laws degree from Harvard University. Also in 1957, he was given a Master of Arts degree and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1960 from Yale University.
Brilliant began his career as an assistant professor, professor and chairman of art history department at the University of Pennsylvania in 1962. Eight years later he took a position of a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University and held it until 2004. Also Richard worked as Anna S. Garbedian professor in the humanities at the same university from 1990 to 2004. Since 2004 he has been Anna S. Garbedian Professor Emeritus in the Humanities in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He is currently working on numerous book projects.
Brilliant was known for his books such as "Gesture and Rank in Roman Art: The Use of Gestures to Denote Status in Roman Sculpture and Coinage", "Visual Narratives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art", "Portraiture", "Commentaries on Roman Art" and "My Laacoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks".
(Analyzing the theme, provenance, and history of the Vatic...)
(During the spring of 2004 the Minneapolis Institute of Ar...)
(Facing the New World features important paintings by dist...)
(It is the surest fact of our existence, one we can never ...)
(Illustrated book of Roman Art about the The Use of Gestur...)
(This is the first general and theoretical study devoted e...)
Brilliant was a member of the Massachusetts Bar Association, College Art Association, American Numismatic Society, German Archaeology Institute, American School of Classical Studies, Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, New York Academy of Science and Phi Beta Kappa.
On June 24, 1951 Richard Brilliant married Eleanor Luria. They have 4 children.